Online lessons return to the classroom

Stuart Winthrope

The University of Melbourne’s online courses have opened access to courses in zoology, economics and climate change to anyone with a computer and internet connection through the Coursera platform.

But these courses also provide data for research which benefits on-campus teaching.

“Among the many reasons that we got into MOOCS was the research potential of harvesting and mining data that comes out of the Coursera platform,” University of Melbourne Director of eLearning Professor Gregor Kennedy says.

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Professor Kennedy leads the University’s Learning Analytics Research Group, which draws upon staff expertise in psychology, education, and computer science to help understand students’ online learning processes and outcomes.

The group aims to understand patterns of students’ online behaviour and how these are related to student success. This understanding will help to inform interventions for students who are having trouble with classes.

“Through mining the interactions of students in these online environments, we will be able to determine ways in which we can support students in their learning,” Professor Kennedy says.

“One of the areas that we’re actively pursuing is the use of predictive analytics to determine when students are going to get in trouble and provide personalised and adaptive learning environments to them online.”

Meanwhile, grading class sizes in the thousands provides both challenges and opportunities.

“When you’ve got 50,000 students enrolled in a course assessment activities need to be bulletproof, which puts pressure on rubrics for assessment and how the activities are constructed in the first place,” Professor Kennedy says.

Students in Professor of Economics Jeff Borland’s Generating the Wealth of Nations MOOC were required to not only examine the economic history of their own country, but also assess their peers’ work.

However, many students said this was among the best parts of the course; one student was enjoying reading other peoples’ work so much that he evaluated 15 of his peers’ assignments.

Professor Borland says that this experience has convinced him to build more opportunities for peer feedback into his on-campus classes.

While he notes that only a minority of the students that enrolled completed all the assessment requirements in the course, Professor Borland says the nature of MOOCs encourages people to sample different subjects more than on-campus classes.

Nonetheless, he says that even taking this into account, the level of interest online was remarkable, compared to a semester of on-campus teaching, with a core of highly-engaged and motivated students with a wide range of backgrounds.

“It’s pretty amazing to think that I had 2000 people watching the videos of my course every week,” Professor Borland says.

“It would take me ten years of teaching here to teach that many students.”

The students themselves brought a diversity of examples, readings and alternate approaches to the subject that he had not encountered previously.

“It was very hard work, but it was also a great experience to teach in terms of the quality of work and the amount that I learned from the students,” he says.

However, Professor Borland says universities should not expect MOOCs to function as resources that can be reused year-on-year.

While online classes can reach massive audiences, macroeconomics and other subjects that seek to explain the world must adapt and draw from recent events to engage students.

“I think for a provider of high-quality education like the University of Melbourne, it is also important to recognise that a big part of what we offer is the up-to-dateness of our courses,” he says.

“That means you may end up having to remake the MOOCs every year.”

Meanwhile, Professor Kennedy says that MOOCs are continuing to develop in unexpected directions.

“That this is one of the reasons we got involved – to be at the vanguard of this innovation is exciting. It means we can take opportunities to experiment and do new things, and part of that is being prepared to move flexibly,” he says.